Blaine Holt to Newsmax: Woke Military Stifling Recruitment

The Pentagon is blaming declining military recruitment numbers on the state and health of today's youth, but that is a "convenient camouflage" for the wokeness that is keeping people from signing up for the service, retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Blaine Holt said Wednesday on Newsmax.

"We have walked away from mission and country," Holt, a Newsmax contributor, said on "John Bachman Now," where he appeared with Blue Line Moving CEO John Rourke, a retired U.S. Army staff sergeant and recruiter. "What I mean by that is we've replaced a meritocracy with diversity, equity, and inclusion programs with a love for environmental, social, and governance programs — basically Marxism."

Further, the COVID-19 vaccine mandates were a disaster, he said, as well as the fall of Kabul, "so that equates to people wanting to vote with their feet and getting out."

According to a recent Pentagon study, over three-quarters of young Americans are precluded from military service because of drugs, mental illness, or because they are too overweight to serve. But Rourke told the program that recruitment efforts are failing because the nation's veterans and active duty service personnel, the best advertisement for service, are being mistreated.

"Those people are not going to come out and recommend to their friends and families that they follow the same path that they did," he said. "This is the biggest problem. I think that's facing the Army is that we're not taking care of our soldiers. We're not putting in enough work to soldiers that are transitioning out of the army into the civilian world and sending them up for their best success."

Instead, people with years of service are being kicked out "because they wouldn't take an experimental vaccine that didn't work," he said. "Those people were thrown to the wayside. Do you think that those people are walking around the United States spreading the good word of the Army? I think not."

Holt said he decided to make the military a career at a time when then-President Ronald Reagan was restoring the military to its prominence after years of being shamed over Vietnam.

"I couldn't wait to be part of the Air Force," he said. "The three words made great sense to me: fly, fight, win. All the people that came before me inspired me to go forward and do that. Our heroes were probably not the most politically correct crew you could find for recruiting posters today."

Rourke, meanwhile, said that his favorite job in the Army was as a recruiter, as he "felt it was the job that I can make the greatest difference in a person's life."

"I think that they need to get back to letting recruiters recruit and get away from the politics and the wokeness," he said. "It's literally killing our military service. It's horrible."

Holt said he thinks the pendulum will swing the other way one day, but "it's going to take great people to make it so. And so I just want the young people to have a very, very clear vision about what it means now to go in and what those threats are."

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